RoadRunner vs. DSL

Guess they didn't tell you that you shared your connection with half the city.

So far, I heard DSL rocks with constant speed as opposed to cable slow-downs during peak hours.

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...out with the old, in with the new...

 

I had RoadRunner for about 2 years, and then I switched to ADSL, which I've had for about a year now. In almost every respect, the ADSL is better. First of all, it's much cheaper and my RoadRunner connection used to vary in speed a lot, depending on who in my neighbourhood was online at the time. ADSL seems to be fast all the time, since it's a dedicated line. Sometimes with the cable modem, I'd experience patches of major lag, which were a pain in the butt. I have never had a single problem with my ADSL service yet. It always seems to hover around 650k, and I don't even have the fastest package they offer.

To summarize, both are good. If you can get cable for a lot cheaper than DSL, by all means go with the cable, especially if you're in a small neighbourhood and bandwith congestion isn't an issue. If, however, the services are the same price, or if DSL is cheaper, then go for the DSL. Overall, it's a better type of connection than cable. The cable companies may claim theoretically higher speeds, but in reality those speeds are rarely reached, and you probably won't notice the difference anyway. DSL is more stable and is fast enough for even the most power-hungry downloader.

So, I recommend DSL, unless cable is substantially cheaper.

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My dream job is to be a Houston Rockets towel-boy.

[This message has been edited by fadeaway (edited August 21, 2000).]

 

I have a couple of friends with each, and I'll agree that they are both much better than dial up connections.

But, for speed and reliability, DSL wins every time. I usually have speeds ranging from 650-800, and few, if any, problems. In fact, it tends to run faster than my T1 connection at work. Everyone I've talked to with Roadrunner runs around 300-350.

Also, one friend in particular (who just switched to DSL) had to have the cable people come adjust the connection (outside the house) four times -- four times that he had to make an appointment and have someone there all day to fix the thing. They also had to run a separate cable for the computer -- which he could only hook up at one place in his house.

The big obstacles you should work to overcome are service (well, SW Bell is lousy there also), reliability, availability (It won't hurt my feelings if you run Optel out of town -- but right now the Roadrunner area is very limited), and a lagging fourth, speed.

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On the speed, well, it's good on roadrunner, but I wouldn't call it "unheard of" , and it doesn't seem to compare in practice to DSL. I think you are getting the company line.

PS -- Probably one of the truest tests of speed -- My friend uses napster -- he can usually borrow songs off of 3-4 cable connections with no noticeable drop off in download time.

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Stay Cool...

[This message has been edited by dc sports (edited August 21, 2000).]

 

RoadRunner was sweet for the 3 months I had it this summer. I have no complaints with Time Warner. If I didn't get free T1 at school, I would definitely go with cable. I had no problem downloading 4 songs at one time with Napster. The technician told me that I had one of the strongest RoadRunner signals that he had ever seen. And the guy actually came on time and wired a TV in my room for free. The free install was only for RoadRunner. I doubt he was jocking the service since I had already signed up. I have heard horror stories about SW Bell. Who wants to sign up for a contract? Who wants to sit at home with a modem until an overworked technician arrives months later? I sure don't so I went with RoadRunner. Of course I had cable so I had a choice. RoadRunner by itself is pretty expensive. I was uploading and downloading at higher speeds than my DSL friend. A couple of times my service went down when Time Warner was upgrading. Currently, DSL provided by SW Bell can't compare to RoadRunner.


[This message has been edited by Smokey (edited August 21, 2000).]

 

On a purely technical basis, cable modem is not as fast as the fastest DSL, but then most people can't get and/or can't afford the fastest DSL (VDSL). VDSL is faster than a T3. Cable modem speeds if I remember max out at around 27 megabits/sec (that could be understating it) while VDSL hits 52 megabits/sec. But again, VDSL isn't feasible for the average consumer.... yet.

Regarding DSL not being as fast as their ads claim. That's hilarious coming from a cable modem instructor. He's probably talking about the CIR rates that DSL providers guarantee. Despite the CIR at the telco, you will see inconsistent throughput on a cable modem line far more frequently than on a DSL line simply because you are technically not sharing bandwidth to your CO. On a cable modem, you're sharing bandwidth as soon as your data exits your house. Shared bandwidth across your neighborhood backbone is a b****. Also, if he said that cable modem connections are the fastest connections there are to the Internet, he's an ignorant instructor. Unless he means "for the average consumer". If he means the fastest period, tell him to put his midget cable modem connection against the OC-x connections to Internet backbones I have at work and then we'll see...

Regarding its connection speeds "being unheard of". Trust me, it's heard of and surpassed regularly.

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Just shut up and post

 

Most new installations don't require you to sit at home. Most (damn-near all is what I should say) new installations are what are considered "splitterless" installations. What you're talking about was what was going on during initial xDSL deployment. Now all they do is ship you a DSL modem and several microfilters. These microfilters just plug into your phone jacks and you plug any analog device other than your DSL modem, such as phone, fax, etc. into them. The DSL modem simply plugs into your wall. All provisioning is done off customer premises by the telco (GTE, SWBell, etc). As for installing a DSL modem, what the heck is to install? As long as you have your network card and networking set up, you take CAT-5 cable, run it to your DSL modem, take another patch cable and run it to your phone jack. Oh, and you have to plug the modem in to an electrical source. It takes all of umm... 12 seconds. I timed myself.

No kidding... there's a couple of reasons why you won't find too many businesses running on cable modem lines. Reliability and availability.

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Just shut up and post

 

I just d/l'd 7 songs at once over a measly 768k (half-a-T1) DSL line. Downloading 4 files at once (or 7 for that matter) should be simple for any of the connections we're talking about in this thread.

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Just shut up and post

[This message has been edited by Dr of Dunk (edited August 22, 2000).]

 

I have Roadrunner currently and it seems to run between 300-400k. It seem slow in comparison to the speeds which you guys are talking about. Someone explain to me what fiberoptics is. I've heard of it before, I just don't know what it is.

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Francis out top, 9 seconds on the clock, he gives a no look pass to Cuttino Mobley, 4 seconds left, Mobley passes to an open Langhi in the corner with 1 second left! Langhi at the buzzer.......YES!!! How Sweet It Is!!

 

"Fiber optics" is a really general term. It deals with the transmission of data across very very very very skinny pieces of glass or plastic wires. The data is transmitted like light pulses. The advantage of fiber optics is that it can carry MUCH more data than standard copper cable of the same gauge/size. That's a really layman's definition of it. To get a bit geekier, have you ever heard of ISP's or web hosting services talking about "we have OC-3 connections", yada, yada? That "OC" part refers to "optical carrier". It is in reference to wires that use fiber optic technology to send data. OC-3 in this case means speeds of about 153 megabits/sec. Fiber optics like this are commonly used in networks called a "Synchronous Optical Networks" (SONET) or in ATM networks.

Also, when people say that they have 300k-400k speeds, they may be misleading you. There's a difference between 300k and 300K. My 768k DSL line can get around 85-90K of throughput. The difference between k and K is the difference between a kilobit and a kilobyte and it's a BIG difference. I can see cable modem users getting speeds of over 100K, but I don't see too many DSL users getting that speed unless they get the fastest DSL packages out there (1.5 megabits/sec or faster).

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NO GO ON MO FO!!!!

[This message has been edited by Dr of Dunk (edited August 22, 2000).]

 

OK, why don't we do an apples to apples comparison for the benefit of countingcrow. (And because I'm curious!)

Here is a link to a bandwidth speed test provided by MSN. Click on the link, and give it a few seconds for the ????? to be replaced by numbers. Post the results here, with the type of connection and any special notes. You might refresh a few times and take and take an average, since conditions are constantly changing.
http://computingcentral.msn.com/topics/bandwidth/speedtest50.asp

My Southwestern Bell ADSL tonight is running at 708 Kbps / 86.8 K Bytes/sec.



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Stay Cool...

 

My Sympatico ADSL is running at 529kbps and 64.9 K/sec.

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My dream job is to be a Houston Rockets towel-boy.

 

My work connection, which is supposed to use T1 connections*, ran at an average of 698 kbps / 88.4 K Bytes/sec.

*There are several thousand people on this network, which may slow it down.

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Stay Cool...

 

I guess my information is pretty old. Both are pretty easy self installs, but those were some horror stories I heard about SW Bell. I never had DSL so I couldn't say myself, but I had a great experience with cable.

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dcsports,

Most of those speed tests aren't accurate. The reason is you're not only at the mercy of your own circuit and local loop, you're at the mercy of countless hops, servers, and pipes in between you and the server running the tests. The best way to test it is to download a 1 MB or greater file from your ISP using FTP and see how fast the transfer rate is.

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NO GO ON MO FO!!!!

 

I had SWBell DSL installed in August of last year. It took two weeks for the installer guy to come by and hook it up (they didn't allow self-installs. That wasn't an option. And the guy did rewire one of the phone jacks), but once the guy came by, everything worked great. And the few times I had to call technical support, they quickly answered my questions or solved my problem (the only problem I had was a couple of times, the connections in my area were down for about an hour or so, and also every once in a while, I would have to unplug the DSL modem, wait five minutes and plug it in again to get it to work). I had good speed even though they told me I would have the lower speed (I was too far away to get the highest speed service), but I noticed that the speeds when I was downloading or uploading files was actually listed as faster than I was supposed to be getting.

The only reason I don't have DSL anymore is that I moved to a place where I couldn't get it, so I got the cable instead. I haven't had any problems with the cable and haven't noticed any times when the connection has gotten slower (at least not enough for me to notice. It may have gotten slower at some point but not slow enough for me to be able to tell), but I would assume that there probably aren't that many people that have cable modem service in my apartment complex.

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@home cable modem user here. Speed test results all > 1 Mbps . My bottleneck is my machine when it comes to surfing(PPro 200; 32 meg). I'm waiting to buy an Athlon Thunderbird with a DDR SDRAM motherboard/ chipset. I sure hope the motherboard is out by the end of the year because I'm running out of patience .

One thing about my specific cable connection is I will sometimes lose my connection to the network and tech support can't help. All they can say is, "Oh...I can't ping you."
Well...DUH . It comes back eventually but I always seem to lose it at the worst times. Let's hope I don't lose it for the Rocket game chats!

Surf

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Geez, Surf, aren't you a contractor? Shouldn't you be able to afford something better than that 32 MB machine?

I'm trying to get parts for a new machine of my own. Windows 2000 on my Celeron 400 with 128 MB of RAM ain't cuttin' it. How sad. I'd try it on this machine, but then the only thing different about this one is the mobo and an extra 128 MB of RAM which I don't think will make that much of a difference. By "that much" I mean that it takes, no exaggeration here, about 4-5 minutes to boot up. LOL!

I'm looking at the Thunderbird 800 at the moment or a Duron 700.

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NO GO ON MO FO!!!!

[This message has been edited by Dr of Dunk (edited August 22, 2000).]

 

I'm one of those guys that waits and waits and waits for the next best thing until I am satisfied....too me that is DDR SDRAM since it's only a month or two away. Hey...I'm doing better....it used to be Pentium 4...but those chips are going to be way overpriced and who needs that kind of power.

My PPro200 can still run everything I need except most of the latest games(which sucks).
Oh well....if I were smart, I would buy that sub-1,000 PIII 733 with crappy motherboard and SDRAM from Dell....nah.

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I figured it would be good enough for an unscientific survey. I don't really know of an easier way to get a rough apples to apples comparison.



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Stay Cool...